(“ How DARE you lie to your wife!” Ilana says, when Abbi initially demurs about her participation in Soulstice’s pseudo-Olympics.
There is Ilana, to soothe Abbi (“ Yankee Candle Store, Vanilla Bean B, B, and B, right when it opens”) after the competitive streak in Abbi streaks a little too hard. There Abbi is, to help Ilana remove the 12-pound bike chain whose key she has lost and that she’s had belted around her all day. Instead, the women’s mental and emotional energies-and those of the show that contains them-are focused on each other. The guys (and, occasionally, girls) here fill the traditional rom-comic role of “the best friend,” ranging from the boring-but-supportive to the wacky: They’re around, but that’s pretty much all they are. They sleep (or, often, try to sleep) with guys. The broads of Broad City are straight, for the most part (though “sexuality exists on a continuum!” Ilana points out during the new season).
That they don’t sleep together is, in their world, very much beside the point. Which is also to say that Abbi and Ilana are co-stars in a rom-com that is rom-y in every way but the most basic. The pair, as Ann Friedman put it, are “more obsessed with each other than they are with men.” They are very probably the loves of each other’s lives. They are each other’s Happily Ever After.
The women’s partnership, crucially, is not merely a matter of social circumstance they aren’t simply keeping each other company until their respective dudes carry them along to their Happily Ever After. “Seriously: Very Jay and Bey.” Abbi and Ilana are each other’s Happily Ever After. “ We are very upwardly mobile right now,” Ilana informs Abbi in the new season. (Ilana, playing the part of the Bumbling Husband, gives Abbi many reasons to be upset with her-reasons the patient, nurturing Abbi generally ignores.) They accept each other’s faults, and embrace them. They love each other, passionately-often illogically. They are dedicated to each other, wholly.
#COMEDY CENTRAL SOCIAL SCENE FREE#
To each other.Ībbi and Ilana spend most of their free time together. While the marriage plot may still, dissolved and distended, drive many of Hollywood’s cultural products, Broad City reflects friendship’s age-old, but also new, reality: The show is suggesting that its heroines are already, effectively, married. And maybe more, too?Ībbi and Ilana share, basically, what a lot of young women-and young men-share in this age of delayed marriage and emergent adulthood and platonic roommates and geographic peripateticism and economic prosperity and economic uncertainty: a friendship that occupies the psychic space that used to be devoted to spouses and children.
Romance? Yes, but it’s somehow less than that. Best friendship? Definitely, but it’s somehow more than that. And the question of what that intimacy is, definitionally. What matters is that their near-death experiences, with all their attendant wackiness, filter down to the same thing that every scene in Broad City will come down to, in the end: the intimacy Abbi and Ilana share.
#COMEDY CENTRAL SOCIAL SCENE SERIES#
The two have just had a series of traumatic experiences: Abbi has had a run-in with a runaway porta-potty, and Ilana has gotten stuck, via a magnetized bike chain, to the back of a delivery truck, and they’ve each been totally scared, and. The Pentagon’s Push to Program Soldiers’ Brains Michael Joseph Gross
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